


Another One Bites the (Star)Dust

by Greenninjagal



Series: Space and Everything In It [4]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Alien!Remus, Alternate Universe - Aliens, Far too many pages of Virgil detailing why he needs therapy and not getting it, Human!Virgil, Humans are space orcs, I swear!! I would never make him this unhinged without like, M/M, Mentions of Murder, Neither is Remus, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Okay so I kinda made him unhinged with a not so good reason, Remember when this au was fluffy, Space Au is back!! After too Long!!, Sympathetic Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders, Trauma, Virgil is not having a good time surprisingly, a reason, forced attempted suicide, human!Janus, my bad - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:55:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 18,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27362335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Greenninjagal/pseuds/Greenninjagal
Summary: The tail around his neck felt like a noose, tightening and he wasn’t sure if his neck was going to be able to remain unbroken for much longer against the gravity of the ship.“Re...mus!” Virgil begged.Remus Prince, the Erefren who was responsible for setting several ambushes on them, for sending space pirates to nearly kill them, for stealing and pillaging and murdering most of the way through this galaxy and the next, just smiled down at him from where he was lounging completely unconcerned. "Why, hello there! The other Deathworlder! I've been meaning to get you all alone!"***Aka Virgil is not okay and refuses to admit it and Remus is not okay and knows it all too well.
Relationships: Anxiety | Virgil Sanders/Deceit | Janus Sanders, Dark Creativity | Remus "The Duke" Sanders/Deceit | Janus Sanders
Series: Space and Everything In It [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1768714
Comments: 51
Kudos: 230
Collections: TSS Fanworks Collective





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hello!! Sorry for the long five month wait. This is draft lucky number seven please be nice to it; all the others died sad terrible flaming deaths. :D

The Dust was not grey, Virgil noted absently. It was more of blueish color, like that one pair of jeans Virgil had worn until the all the color had washed out of them, like every pair of sneakers that his parents pressured him to get because he was “being too picky” for wanting purple shoes, like the towels in Janus’s bathroom that they used to dry off after an unplanned midnight swim.

The Dust was not grey. It floated in the air suspended in a breathless wonderment, like ashes after a house fire. Virgil got to stare at it for a minsannu, a qisannu, an eternity as it hung in the emptiness and he could see every detail of each individual grain. It was the cool grey color inherently, but if he looked too closely, too long, too hard, he could see the specks of red and purple in it, like embers flitting away, somehow too hot and too cold at the same time.

Or maybe that was just the blood.

Virgil’s mouth tasted like both: the dust and the blood. It coated the back of his mouth and his throat and the inside of his lungs and made every inhale  _ burn _ in a way that Virgil hadn’t known was possible. He wanted to cry, did cry, had been crying for longer than he even remembered.

His eyes itched from tears, his chest ached from the bruises and the broken ribs and the knife wound that needed stitching he couldn’t get. Not here, not ever. His head hurt from where he hit the ground minsannus ago so hard that his vision blurred and all he had been able to see is that dust moving in slow motion right over him.

He could hear the cheers all around him still, the echoing violent wordless noises made from clickings and growls and gurgles and screeches and--

And it was all different and foreign and Virgil didn’t know what was going on, didn’t  _ want  _ to know what was happening around him. His skin was on fire, burning and bubbling and blistering under the harsh sun until his outsides felt just like his insides and he wasn’t sure which was which. He tried to blot out the noise, he tried and tried and  _ tried  _ but no matter how hard he pressed his hands to his ears the crowd’s voices were louder, stronger, more powerful and more roaring. 

He could feel the vibrations of the noise  _ shaking  _ him apart.

He couldn’t breathe.

_ “Virgil!”  _

Another voice sliced through the chaos, sliced through the cacophony and the crowd, sharp and pleading and  _ familiar  _ in a way that made Virgil’s soul beg _.  _ And Virgil’s whole body writhed in agony from how quickly he uncurled himself to find the source of it. It sounded like safety, like softness and protection and something that wasn’t stained with grit and sweat and blood and  _ dust _ .

“Virgil!” Patton yelled, appearing right in front of him, so small and so breakable. His eyes were so big and so weak and all it would take was just one jab and Patton would be gone forever, and Virgil would never get a hug from him again, would never get to see him dance around the kitchen again, would never get to hear him call him “kiddo” again. 

What was he doing? Was he  _ stupid _ ?

The dust looked wrong on his skin: it turned Patton’s pale green flush to a pasty grey. Like a Halloween Ghost, a ghoul with makeup on, like a poorly made joke that wormed around Virgil’s chest and  _ squeezed  _ all the scarce oxygen from them.

There wasn’t enough oxygen in the first place, Virgil knew. Never enough, not here on the planet’s surface. It was a mockery of Earth; just enough gravity to hold him down, just enough oxygen to keep him breathing, just enough distance from the sun to keep from burning him alive. Virgil could never breathe in enough, and if the fights went on too long his body boiled, and if he moved too slow he would be  _ dead.  _

“Oh  _ kiddo _ ,” Patton said, between cracked and drying lips and taking a step back from him. “What did you  _ do _ ?”

Virgil's chest lurched, like there was something inside of him trying to claw its way out. His head pounded, and every time he blinked he swore Patton got further away, like he was scrambling back, like he was afraid, like he was running and leaving Virgil there, all alone. The words rang in his head, echoing louder and louder until Virgil couldn’t hear anything else.

“Pat--!” Virgil yelled, screamed,  _ begged.  _ He was right there-- no, please don’t leave him, not here, not alone-- he’s  _ sorry, so sorry, he’ll be better, do better please don’t make him-- _

He strained for the smaller alien, desperate and broken and hysterical. He lunged after Patton, because Patton had always meant warmth, safety, home. He threw a frenzied arm out reaching for him and--

The dust was not grey, and it didn’t look grey on his own skin. Virgil knew this because the dust was  _ always  _ on him. Clinging to his skin, caked on in the clots of blood and the dried up sweat and recesses of every tattered piece of fabric he’d ever tried to hold on too. He couldn’t get it off of himself no matter how much he rubbed, scraped,  _ clawed  _ at himself. The dust clung to him like a shadow, like a phantom, and it made his sunburn look faintly purple.

“How  _ could  _ you?” Patton’s voice sobbed because Virgil’s hands were not just faintly purple. 

They were red. And sticky. And  _ dripping.  _

“No,” Virgil choked. His mouth tasted like ash, like dirt, and that  _ fucking  _ dust. “No! Nono Nononono!” He stepped back and the solid ground that he’d been thrown against again and again and again swayed and bucked under his feet; an ocean of grit that his knees couldn’t brace against.

The crowd was cheering. He could almost hear them: even as he was screaming, even as he was pressing his drenched hands over his ears, even as he was struggling to breathe and staring at splatters of blood that weren’t, shouldn’t,  _ couldn’t be _ his. There were so many voices, so many people crammed in the arena, watching him spit up blood, watching him just barely dodge blows that were going to crush his ribcage, watching him recklessly  _ get away  _ by any means necessary. Virgil couldn’t make out the words, it was too loud, too much, too many but he could feel the blood dripping down his face, matting his hair, pooling in his ears as he tried to drown them out.

“This isn’t real--” He yelled. “This isn’t--!”

_ “Vir….gil….”  _

“No!” Virgil screamed, “This isn’t-- I didn’t--!”

He stumbled back again, eyes closed, and his lungs begging for air he couldn’t give them. His foot hit something, stepped on something, rolled his ankle on something and then he was hitting the ground again, driving his elbow into his gut and his head knocking the rock floor.

His eyes stung from the dust that cascaded all around him, thick and heavy and like a smog that he couldn’t ever escape. It rose up and blotted out the sky, the arena, the jeering crowd, Patton-- the dust swallowed the world and Virgil coughed trying to keep it from taking him too.

“It’s not--” Virgil croaked, gagging at the burning in the back of his throat, at the grit in his teeth.

There was a body at his feet. A body that he tripped over. A body that had pale skin, four limbs, and a face that Virgil would know even if he were blind: the dirty blond hair, the mismatched eyes, the pale lips. A body thats cut open and tore apart and bloodied and eyes that looked so scared in their last moments and--

And Virgil’s seen his hands this color, this messed up, this ruined enough times to  _ know how that body got that way. _

_ “Vi…”  _

“NO!” Virgil shrieked. “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. THIS IS **N’T** **_REAL_ ** \--!”

**\-- Virgil woke up to someone scre** aming. It took him a long moment to realize it was him, and even longer to wedge his fist in his mouth to stop it.

His room hummed with the silence, the aftermath of a storm that had left nothing but carnage in its wake: Virgil was on the floor, his legs tangled up in his blankets and himself shaking so hard that his teeth dug into his knuckles. The taste of blood made his stomach lurch, and suddenly he was scrambling up, fingers clawing at the soft rug under his feet and he was spitting his saliva out of his mouth like it was possible for him to choke on his own tongue.

It wasn’t real. 

But Virgil’s head rang from the impact and there was grit in his teeth, blood on his hands and the lack of noise was so loud that he couldn’t hear his own breathing. Was he breathing? His lungs burned like they were on fire, like he was back under the sun of the Welsor home planet and the white boils were peppering his chest until he couldn’t inhale at all.

His knees went weak right before the door and he hit the floor so heavily he didn’t feel it at all. His arms wrapped around his chest turning him into something smaller, something dismissable, something unseeable, because surely if no one and nothing could see him, then no one and nothing would bother him at all.

There was dust in his mouth, blood on his lips, aches in everything else that he owned. His toes curled in and he drove his chin directly into his collar bone.

It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t--

The oxygen felt thin, crisp and brittle as he desperately tried to coax it into his lungs and hold it there for longer than a minsannu, longer than a blink, longer than an earthly nanosecond. It was like trying to bail water out of a boat with his hands, except that the boat was the fucking  _ Titanic  _ and he was up to his shoulders in water already. 

The ground was cold. 

The room was dark.

So why did Virgil still feel like he was in the Welsor Fighting Rings? It had been a year, or something-- Virgil tried to think, to count the days, but time in space slipped away from him even when he was feeling good. The ship’s time cycles were wonky depending on the quadrant and Roman liked to set them to the nearest habitable planet’s cycle. But Virgil had been pretty sure, he’d thought enough time had passed that the nightmares should have  _ stopped. _ He shouldn’t be dreaming of blood under his nails and dust clinging to his body.

He was happy now! He was living his best life!

He had Patton who would make up puns and swing from the rafters and make sure he ate; Roman who would drag him to their little armory and teach him how to defend himself incase something ever happened to them; he had Logan who would gladly take the time to talk to him about cultural differences between species or ramble about his new found discovery.

He had  _ Janus _ . Who he thought he lost a lifetime ago, who he thought he’d never get to see again, who he hadn’t really left the side of since they had recovered both him and Remus from the Pol’turs. He had Janus whose eyes glistened with warmth so familiar it felt like being home more than Earth ever had, whose touch was featherlight and unmistakable, whose smiles alone took his breath away and he’d gladly keep giving it if it meant Janus’s kept smiling. He had Janus who could kiss him a million times and Virgil would never get tired of it.

He was  _ happy  _ to be here. To be in Space. To be with these three aliens and Janus and be nowhere near Earth at all. To be free and lawless and completely in control of his own destiny.

He was happy, so why couldn’t he figure out how to sleep through the night?

He felt  _ dirty _ , which made no sense at all. He was on a ship in the middle of space and he had showered last night using shampoo that smelled like grape soda. Janus had commented on it too, saying he smelled nice and pecking him on the check right before he strolled off to his own room for a bit of alone time for bed. Virgil dragged his nails down his upper arms, down his forearms and feverishly rubbed, trying to get off dust and dirt and even his own  _ skin  _ if that would get the feeling to just  _ go away.  _

There were tears in his eyes, on his cheeks, inching their ways down his neck and irritating everywhere they touched. His lungs howled, and begged, and cried and Virgil couldn’t do anything but curl tighter in on himself.

He was happy. He was not dirty. He was alive and breathing. He was not in the Welsor Fighting Rings.

He was okay.

He was not going to tell anyone about this.

Virgil felt the coldness of the polyfurnish floor seep up into this body, crawling over him, through him, in him like a wave washing him away. He was the Big Bad Deathworlder after all, who came from the Deathworld itself, not knowing a thing about the other races that lived out in Space with a capital “S”. They called him a savage, a brute, an animal that needed to be locked up when it wasn’t being thrown into the fighting ring to win them money and prestige. He was the undefeatable champion, the one that brought the horrible old legends of Deathworlders to life, the one could kill without-- without---

He thought he had forgotten what it was like, for some reason: the way that a pulse felt under his hands, the look in a creature's eyes as they suddenly went unnaturally still, the smell of inhuman blood hanging over him because some creature’s insides were now clumped in his hair. He thought he had forgotten what it was like to take away a life.

His stomach lurched again, jumping straight through his ribcage and up his throat in such a violent motion that Virgil’s eyes rolled right back into his head and he saw white static. 

Butterfly wings, he thought. That was what Patton’s pulse was like, considering that he had two different hearts pumping so rapidly that Virgil wouldn’t have even known what the feeling was if Patton hadn’t told him. Roman’s was heavy and loud like a drum beat and protected by a very human looking ribcage. Logan’s was quick and quiet and unusually only as calm as the lights flicking through the rest of his body, like the rain back on Earth.

Janus’s was soft. It was real.

Because Janus hadn’t died. He wasn’t dead. Virgil hadn’t killed him and he was just down the other hall sleeping soundly in his own room,  _ come on, he knew this, Janus hadn’t died--  _

Virgil had fallen asleep to the sound so many times before. Back on Earth it was a steady thrump that had lulled him from his thoughts, and Virgil had found his favorite part of their secret sleepovers was watching Janus’s chest lift and fall while the TV screen credit lights painted him in a glossy hue. It was constant, strong, undefeatable: Virgil admired that heart beat of Janus’s, admired the way that it had started so weak when they had first met and steadily gotten bolder, brighter, louder.

Janus was happy here. Virgil knew it from the curve of his lips, from the sparkle in his eyes, from the relaxation of his shoulders as he leaned back and pressed himself into Virgil’s chest when they sat together. When he walked into a new room, Virgil was the one that Janus always looked for and he always lit up when they made eye contact, like even after all this time Virgil was still something he could never get tired of looking at. Janus’s laugh was rich, his tone playful, his energy boundless and free and wonderful. Janus was  _ happy _ and his heart paraded that happy tune, undaunted by anything.

And Virgil was curled up on the floor in the middle of the night, feeling like a foreigner in his own body.

They had made a promise once upon a time, once upon a star, once upon a night that both of them hadn’t wanted to remember but couldn’t ever forget: the Robotics show where Virgil had thought he had finally done something that would make his parents proud of him, but the Ekans family had shown up and Janus’s amicable smile (and a hefty wad of cash) had stolen first place from him. Second place was worthless to his parents. It always had been. 

~~_ “How’d you know?”  _ Janus had asked and Virgil’s mouth had gone dry because he hadn’t known and he had just been saying whatever he could to hurt everyone else.  _ “Please, Virgil, whatever you want-- You--you can’t tell anyone, please, my parents--” _ ~~

~~ Virgil had started hating Mayor Ekans and his wife for real after that. ~~

“I am nothing,” Janus had said that night with tears in his eyes and a smile on his face that looked so terrifying Virgil wanted to do whatever he needed to do just to get him to  _ stop. _ “Don’t you know that, Virgil? I’m nothing but a pile of lies.”

“They’re not even good lies,” Virgil had said. “ Don’t you get tired of being everyone’s favorite person?” 

Janus had laughed, like Virgil had told a joke and the sound of it had twisted Virgil’s arteries. He had stepped back then, looked to the sky and stared up at the stars like they had some sort of answer to a questioned Janus never should have been asking in the first place. 

“I…” Janus had said so very long ago and Virgil never forgot. “I like that you’re honest, Virgil. I don’t...I don’t have to lie to you, and you don’t lie to me.”

“I’m not going to ever lie to you,” Virgil had said once upon a time when the only audience had been Janus and the twinkling stars overhead. 

“You promise?”

But the thing about promises was that...Virgil… well Virgil never had a good experience with them. His parents made a million of them and none of them had ever panned out. Sunday brunches as a family, ice cream if he did his best in school, listening to his side of the story when the teachers called home saying he was in trouble before giving him a punishment. Virgil thought maybe the only time they stuck to their word was when he had asked them if they would show up to his robotics show that last time. 

Wasn’t that funny?

Virgil had spent so long trying not to be like that. Trying so very earnestly to never lie, to never go back on his word, to be exactly what he advertised and keep every promise he made. Where had that gotten him in the long run? 

Maybe it was his genes.

Maybe it was inside of him; that thing that made it so very easy to remember that promise and still pretend that nothing had happened after Janus had disappeared. The worst part was that it had almost  _ worked.  _

It had started out slow, small, dismissible: Virgil saying his favorite color was purple and Janus blinking in surprise because three years ago it had been black (black like coal, like shadows in the night, like a  _ funeral attire he never wore _ ); Virgil showing Janus his work space and his mini robot assistant that didn't really do anything more than hand him a tool and Janus saying “oh you got the lift action to work!” like he hadn’t built much larger, much more complex robots since he’s been out in Space; Virgil not understanding a joke that Janus made in  _ fucking  _ Spanish because he had stopped bothering to practice when Janus had stopped being alive.

It had started as things Virgil barely thought about in the moment, barely thought about until they were long gone, barely thought about until it was too late.

And suddenly Virgil had turned around and realized that a lie of omission was still a lie and that if he told Janus the truth--

What would Janus think when he realizes just how messed up Virgil was? When he realizes that Virgil was a walking time bomb waiting to explode and get both of them killed? What would Janus do when he realizes that Virgil had killed people before? That Janus’s parents turned out to be right all those times the snidely said that Virgil was capable of murder,  _ just look at him, not a hint of remorse for murdering our perfect son! _ ?

What would Janus do when he realizes that Virgil didn’t love Space because of how cool it was, as much as how vast and distant it was from Earth and everyone he used to know?

Somewhere deep inside of Virgil, he knew that if they live long enough, they’ll return back to Earth. An inevitable ending, a cycle coming to its completion, a prophecy coming to fruition. His stomach rebelled, revolted, rioted at the  _ idea _ . 

What would Janus’s parents do when they saw him alive? What would they do when they saw him with Virgil? What would they do just to get them apart again?

Back before everything, back when Virgil’s knowledge of the universe had consisted just of school, home, and second-best-at-everything, back when Janus and him had first looked at each other saw their kindred souls-- Janus’s parents had tried to keep them apart. It wasn’t right, they said, for perfect little Janus to hang out with a punk delinquent like Virgil. He would chew Janus up and spit him back out and ruin every plan the Ekans had drawn up for Janus’s future.

Virgil’s ankle had hurt for  _ weeks  _ after the first time they had him thrown out of their pristine mansion on the hill. Janus had been forbidden to leave his house except for school and all of his puppet friends had been gifted loads of money to drag Janus away any time Virgil happened to walk into the room he was in. Virgil’s own parents had said he wasn’t to bother the Ekans kid in school anymore all while buying a new TV for the living room with money they hadn’t had two days prior.

The separation had torn Virgil to shreds, ripped open his ribcage and stabbed his heart fifty million different ways, but that was nothing to how Janus had seemed to  _ shatter  _ under the weight of it; Virgil hadn’t known that life size mannequins existed until he saw Janus walk around school with a smile that didn’t meet his eyes and motions so practiced they  _ looked  _ robotic.

And when it came down to it, when all the cards were played, when Virgil stepped back and took a very good look at himself, well….what could he see, but the coward that he was? Virgil didn’t want to do that again, didn’t want to let anyone make them do that again. He didn’t want to see Janus empty and lifeless and he didn’t want Janus to see what his parents had done to Virgil when Janus was gone and he didn’t want to go back and prove to Janus’s parents that they were right and Virgil was completely capable of killing someone in cold blood and--

And is it still running away when no one knows that's what he’s been doing all this time?

Virgil knew how this was destined to end, because it was always destined to end. He wanted to laugh because he really had peaked in high school: the best days of his life had passed by him in a blink and he never even appreciated them as much as he should have. He and Janus were the popular TV show that had been going on too long and now the original meaning of it was lost completely. They were going to be cut from Prime TV. And then they were going to be regulated to DVD box sets where you could get all the episodes on five discs for fifty bucks or forget they had ever existed at all because not even Netflix would bother to pick them up again.

Logan would say he was being dramatic. Catastrophizing.

But Logan also didn’t know what a Wendy’s was or understand why Virgil would often cut class when there was the possibility he could learn things instead. 

Virgil had killed someone before. Multiple times. And sometimes when he gets too jumpy, Roman still places a hand on the hilt of his sword out of caution, or when he snaps too hard Patton flinches back, or when he bares his teeth Logan starts dancing with multicolored lights to calm him down by any means possible. Virgil is dangerous to be around.

Why hadn’t the Welsors gotten that memo so long ago? Why didn't they just leave him alone?

He sucked in a painful, heavy, desperate breath, holding it in his shaky pleading lungs until he thought his ears were going to pop. His mouth tasted bad; everything tasted bad, felt bad, thought bad.

Virgil squeezed his eyes closed, counting one mississippi, two mississippi, three-- until he saw bright stars on the back of his eyelids. He breathed out, and forced himself to feel his own warm exhale on his skin. Goosebumps rode down his numb arms and prickled over his shoulders. 

He counted.

The floor. The rug. His shirt. His skin. The late- night-early-morning chill of the ship. 

He opened his eyes, holding on to the steady center in the middle of his chest. His room in the ship, his private spot, the area that no one else came into unless they had permission from Virgil himself. The shadows on his ceiling that looked like demons if he stared too long. The lump of blankets that he had torn off the bed in his nightmare. The rounded dresser with a flat top where he kept half a dozen alien plants-- some of which were glowing faintly now in like nightlights to scare away the monsters under his bed.

Virgil was okay. He was safe.

_ It wasn’t real.  _

He winced as he tried to curl in on himself and push into a sitting position. His head felt heavy, swamped with so many thoughts that the physical weight of them made him sway dangerously. His lungs protested faintly with the motion, but he was getting air in them finally, so they couldn’t complain too much. It was an improvement to the previous five minutes, right?

Right?

_ It hadn’t been real.  _

Virgil reached out only partially blindly and grabbed the corner of his bed to haul himself onto his shaky legs. His head swam again, his knees threatened to buckle except wasn’t really a threat because they  _ did  _ give in a little and Virgil let out hiss of a curse as he threw out his other arm on the soft mattress to hold himself upright. The air was cooler, chillier, crisper, in a way that made Virgil’s own shallow exhales feel like the warmest thing for lightyears.

Part of him wished desperately that Janus would be there, on the other half of his bed, curled up around himself like he used to back on the best nights of their lives. Janus had always moved so little in his sleep, while Virgil sprawled out and took up as much space as he could.

“Like a liquid,” Janus had huffed once, and it had taken Virgil most of the morning to figure out that his tone had been  _ amused,  _ almost  _ fond.  _ Like they were joking. Like they were friends. And Virgil had gotten so distracted by it that he had started scribbling “Virgil Ekans” in the margins of his Chemistry notes like another brainwashed zombie that subscribed to the “Janus can do no wrong” theory.

(Which was a theory that Virgil had seen disproven so,  _ so  _ many times before. Janus had even told him out right that it was a lie, with dead eyes and a toneless voice.)

But Janus ran warm, and Virgil found himself unbearably cold all of a sudden. 

He wanted, randomly, surprisingly, unbelievably, to climb back into bed and inch over the tiny bit of space that might have been between them and throw an arm around Janus’s waist. He wanted to cuddle up against Janus’s back, and rest his head against his shoulder blades, pressing light sleepy kisses into Janus’s neck and maybe waking him just enough to hear his soft content sighs at the contact.

He wanted it so bad it made his eyes wet. Oh god, was he really that pathetic? A single nightmare and he wanted to go press up against another human, wake him from his sleep-- which Janus needed because God knows what he went through having been in Space for a whole _year_ longer than Virgil ever had to be, not to mention he was still healing from the horrors of the Pol’tur ship so yeah, Janus needed sleep much more than Virgil did. Which meant that Virgil was being pathetic _and_ selfish.

His feet planted themselves on his floor, and he reminded himself three times in a row that the rocking of the ship was familiar and manageable before he let go of his bed and stood on his own. Another shaking breath rocked his lungs and he told himself that there was no dust in the air.

His couple alien flora that resided across the room glowed faintly. Patton told him the name of them once, but he had forgotten it when Patton’s large bug eyes had gotten misty and he’d mentioned that his mother used to have them all over their home back on his planet.

((A planet that no longer exists, because one of their stars had died and it had taken out his planet and three more in the unexpected implosion.))

Virgil hated seeing the Reytin so sad so he avoided bringing up the plants, and tried to keep Patton out of his room as much as possible. 

Virgil took another breath. Then he bent down and picked up the blankets from the floor and tossed them back on his bed. There was an exhaustion in his limbs, a haggarding, wailing type of tired that Virgil recognized: so tired that he couldn’t even sleep. His body ached but it was an ache that could easily be mistaken for bruises and cuts. His skin prickled when he ran a hand over the feathered down of his blankets (there was a name for that too, but Virgil didn’t remember it either) because even though it was completely different from a sandy dirt floor, his brain kept screaming it was made of dust and  _ get it off get it off get it off--  _

Virgil’s breath hitched for a moment when he closed his eyes, a flash of blood and limp limbs and well, Virgil decided right then and there that he probably could survive without blinking for the rest of his life, right? He nearly flopped right back to the floor, as he scoured for his boots-- or really any shoes at all, because anything was better than nothing at all.

((They had taken his shoes when they took him off Earth, which was almost silly, almost hilarious, almost comical. They sold for 450 griot-- which was more than Virgil himself had gone for. He wondered vaguely, if they were still out there, sitting in some alien collector’s hall of treasures. If they were, they were probably in better shape than Virgil was.))

Shoes on. Virgil breathed for another moment and then started towards the door again in measured calculated steps. He was okay. He was okay. He was okay.

Maybe if he told himself it enough it would become true. 

Virgil thought maybe he had read a science experiment about it. Maybe in a psychology class? Virgil barely remembered anything else from it, because he had it right after lunch and the teacher liked to play movies and spending late nights sneaking into and early mornings out of a mansion were mentally taxing.

If one repeated something often enough they started to believe it, right?

He was okay. He was safe. Everything was great. He was happy. 

But then again science wasn’t always right. After all Janus had practiced a smile in the mirror for seventeen years and told everyone who would listen how happy he was and that had turned out to be a  _ huge fucking lie. _

Virgil grabbed the handle of the door and eased it open. He never quite got used to the near silentness of the ship’s doors. The Fighting Rings had been  _ loud  _ all the time: the metal doors clanged and rattled when they shut or swung open and the Welsors who kept them in line were a fan of taking their metal batons to the bars as they walked by and watching their participants cower back from them. The arena gates were heavy and controlled by chains that rumbled and clanged when they moved. When they shut it was with a finality of a judge’s hammer and Virgil never stopped feeling like he was never going to see the other side of the stone walls again. 

Compared to that, the soft slide of his door was unbelievably quiet. It was just another reason, another symbol, another example of how he was here and not  _ there  _ and he was alright and okay and happy.

And his nightmare hadn’t been real.

The lights were dim and red, a setting that appealed to Erefrens like Roman more than Virgil, but at least it wasn’t blinding. The air was warmer here than in his room; Virgil breathed it in as he moved out of his room with unperceptive footsteps.

He was okay. They were okay.

Janus was alive and breathing and fine.

Virgil’s feet took him in that direction anyway.

Roman’s ship had always been made for more than just the four of them. Per Erefren customs they usually had… packs? Logan called it a different word but their game of charades hadn’t been as fruitful as others. It wasn’t like families because it didn’t have to be by blood, or acquaintances because they were closer than that, or teams because it wasn’t a competition-- Virgil had given up back then in a fit of frustration that came from trying to learn Common for too many hours straight. And then he had never gone back to try again. He did know that Roman considered Logan and Patton part of his “pack” and maybe Virgil too, but there was a ritual ceremony that was required and Virgil hadn’t undergone it yet for one reason or another.

The Mindscape, Roman’s beloved ship and their home, was meant to be run by an entire Erefren pack, so maybe seven aliens with bones plates and long weaponizable tails.

The extra rooms on the ship had previously been used for storage if they were used at all. Virgil felt a little bad about how he had clung to Janus when they got him and Remus back on their ship which had forced Logan and Patton to clean two rooms for their guests while Roman piloted them to the next star system and out of danger.

Virgil knew the ship like the back of his hand. Inside and out and every nook and cranny. He knew the halls like his own veins, the rooms like his own limbs. He could navigate his way through it with his eyes closed. When Logan was first teaching him to speak Common, he had called the ship "home" and Virgil had thought that was fair, that was nice, that was the most accurate name for the place they all lived and loved.

He knew all the crawl spaces on it, the hidey-holes, the moveable wall panels. He knew the layout of the floor map, that while impractical made sense with the way Roman’s personality was. He had memories stacked on top of memories of each room that grounded into him as he ran his fingers over the walls: this was where he had yawned in front of Roman and Roman had almost skewered him with his light sword, this is where Patton had first dropped down from the rafters on Virgil’s shoulders in a surprise hug and scared the living daylights out of him, this was where Virgil had found Logan stumbling around so sleep deprived he couldn’t find his own room, this was where Virgil first realized that they were serious when they said they wouldn’t force him to go back to Earth. This was where the space pirates Remus had sent after them had caught Patton and nearly killed him. This was where Roman and Virgil had wordlessly teamed up and obliterated said space pirates and Logan had to talk Virgil out of the resulting panic attack while trying to stop the blood flow from Patton’s unconscious body. 

This was where Roman first explained who the hell Remus was: his crazy, insane sibling who thought that killing each other was a fun entertainment when they were bored.

Virgil slunk down the hall like a shadow, almost quieter than one, too. Janus’s door was in the middle of the hall, nondescript, and plain. Virgil bit his lip looking at it. His hand trailed over the polyfurnish: smooth and sleek and only penetrable by one of Roman’s lazer light swords or a blaster set on high and the marks of both weapons would have been obvious on it, unmissable, unmistakable.

The door wasn’t locked, though. Part of Virgil wondered if that was a leftover habit: something Janus got from leaving his window unlocked every night while waiting for Virgil to steal his way into the house that never would have welcomed him otherwise. The other part of him was chanting about how stupid that was, how insane it was, how self destructive it was. Didn’t he know he couldn’t trust anything in  _ Space  _ not to try and kill him simply because he was a Deathworlder and aliens had been taught to kill first and ask questions never?

But Janus’s door was unlocked and Virgil swallowed the apprehension in his throat and let his stomach acids dissolve it. It was just a peek-- something to get his heartbeat to slow down and to make his blood soften and help his brain  _ shut up _ . Even in the darkness, in the pale red light brought in from the hall, Virgil could make out Janus’s lumpy form on the bed, curled up in the smallest ball he can make and snoring softly.

At least that about him hadn’t changed. 

Virgil watched Janus’s chest rise and fall several even times, counting the infinities between each breath like he was seventeen still and they were lying on Janus’s huge ass bed and he was still trying to find a name for the feeling in his gut. He felt a bit like he slipped back in time, like if he pinched the inside of his wrist he’d wake up from this dream and they’d be back on Earth and the past two years would have been nothing but the most horrid nightmare Virgil’s brain could whip up, like if he reached out and gently brushed against Janus, he’d wake up, and he’d know exactly what to do to help Virgil forget about aliens and Space and blood under his nails and---

And then he remembered that watching people sleep was generally frowned upon, regardless of if they were... whatever they were. Virgil closed the door as quickly and quietly as he could and turned around facing the hall, forcing himself to breathe, and then to breathe again, and he didn’t dare close his eyes.

Janus was alive. He was okay.

Virgil was not, but did that really matter?

He clenched his fingers into fists and opened them again several times, and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. It was only a few feet taller than him, slated with polyfurnish grates that Patton liked to dance along when he was rushing around the ship or climb into when he was having a bad day. He half expected to see the bug eyes of the Reytin sleepily peeking down at him, summoned by his barely concealed negative emotions-- and was incredibly grateful that he didn't. Both because he didn’t want to have to even  _ try  _ to explain what he was doing up and wondering or why he was feeling so bad right now,  _ and  _ because if Patton was there Virgil knew he wouldn’t be able to hold back a terrified scream which no doubt would wake everyo--

_ CLA-THUNK!  _

Before Virgil could even think, his body was launching itself against the doorway to Janus’s room like he could hide his entire body from someone being in the hall. The noise echoed through the interior of the ship, ringing and echoing and it almost drowned out the screech of Virgil’s mind: it was the unmistakable sound of someone dropping  _ something  _ on the floor. 

Something heavy, something decently big: Virgil’s brain immediately screamed that it was a body bag, a corpse, one of his friends being abducted from their rooms by a shadow ambush and he had to do something  _ now  _ or he was never going to see Logan/Roman/Patton/Janus again--

His breath stilled in his stone lungs, holding for a long quisannu, two, three, four, until his vision danced with spots and his knees threatened to send him down to the ground again. There was no other noise, which was more terrifying to him than anything else: no lithe footsteps that belong to Patton sneaking a late night cookie, no slithery sound of Roman’s tail slipping down the hall after him on the way to an impromptu coordinate check, so  _ ch-tchkk _ of Logan’s crystalline body working the joints when he paced while doing some free reading at the late hour.

Virgil’s back pressed against the door pushing it as delicately as he could because the last thing he wanted was Janus waking up and opening the door just to have Virgil tumble back into him and then have to explain why he was pale and shaky and creeping around in the middle of the night like someone who was hiding something and keeping secrets and generally being a terrible whatever-they-were.

His heart hammered in his chest, jumping up to his throat and pounding in his ears. His brain whirled through a million different scenarios, different explanations, different excuses and all of them made his stomach attempt to revolt. Nausea welded up in his senses, burning until he was sure that his mouth was pooling with blood and there was Dust under his nails and if he opened his eyes again he’d see the fighting arena that he was beginning to think he never actually escaped.

The hall was empty.

Virgil breathed out a sigh, an exhale that was barely audible to his own ears. His heartbeat stuttered and slowed and limbs unfroze like fast melting glaciers. He pressed his shaky hands to his chest, holding them there.

It was his imagination. His brain made it up.

There was nothing out there and no one was awake other than him. And Virgil shouldn’t even be awake!

He was being paranoid. He was jumpy and nervous and a mess because of one nightmare and a little bit of guilt over some words that Virgil wasn’t sure how to put into the air yet. (It probably needed to be like a bandaid, right? Virgil should just rip it off and Janus would  _ understand  _ because that’s what Janus did best.) Virgil was freaking out over nothing at all and needed to  _ chill.  _

He was fine. It wasn’t real.

But then his eyes followed the dull floor lights to the junction at the left and he swore that a shadow passed in front of one, just for a minsannu, just for a blink. So quick Virgil would have missed it if he hadn’t been looking.

And the fragile reality that Virgil built around himself practically collapsed on itself. His fingers dug into the wall, a lump in his throat made it hard to breathe again. 

There was someone awake and they weren’t Virgil and Virgil was not ready to admit that he was having nightmares like a child.

Which meant that he should sprint back down the halls back to his room before that someone found him here and he had to explain that he’s so pitiful that now his skin itched in a way he couldn’t get rid of and there was blood and dirt under his nails that no one else could see. It meant that Virgil should hide himself away and stare at his plants until the phisannu became reasonable, maybe even go back to sleep if he could convince his brain that no one was going to die in the safety of the ship right now.

It meant that Virgil shouldn’t creep out to the middle of the hall and stalk his way after the shadow. Whoever it was, was probably someone who  _ also  _ had a nightmare and likely they wouldn’t want company, considering they had done a great job of going unnoticed thus far. 

Goosebumps rose up all along his arms and his legs and pretty much anywhere he could get goosebumps. For a minsannu, it felt like he was in a well rendered horror video game, stumbling blindly into the jaws of an unknown horror that would devour him in a way that would splatter blood all across the walls. Virgil bit his lip so hard he tasted dust. By the time he made it to the junction he saw the shadow pass over, whoever it was had passed down another hall. Although there wasn’t much light, the movements were fluid and quiet: so very different from even Patton’s most subdued frog like hops. 

Virgil darted after it again.

Maybe it was Roman, although Roman didn’t tend to leave his room when he was upset; he spent so little time in his room as compared to everywhere else, it made sense to stay there when he wasn’t feeling 100%. Or it could have been Logan, whose calmness could only be broken by a particularly bad spiral of thoughts and he would seek out the observation deck.

But if that was the case why was he heading for the Transport room?

Virgil stuttered in his step at the realization, freezing all the way down to his fragile bones. Janus was in his room. Patton didn't move like that. Roman and Logan had no reason to skulk their way to the Transport room in the middle of the night.

But Virgil, ever the idiot, had forgotten one tiny, itty bitty detail about this ship: there were six people on it. 

Six people, because Remus was on the ship as well. 

The same Remus who had a longstanding habit of trying to kill Roman and his friends, which now included Logan, Patton, and Virgil. The same Remus who had put together an ambush not too long ago that nearly got Patton stabbed through both his hearts and his eyes, the same Remus who delighted in bloodshed so much that he had been grinning all those weeks ago when he had sent the SOS to Roman for help. The same Remus who Virgil hadn't seen more than a glimpse of the entire time because he hadn't stayed in the medical bay for more than five minutes and had since been causing trouble for Roman everywhere else in the ship. 

The same Remus who Virgil had an  _ extremely  _ hard time believing was wandering around in the night for any benevolent reason.

What was in the Transport room? Virgil bit on his lip as he walked forward, light on his toes and making barely a sound. There were the transport watches that Logan treated with utmost care. A few escape pods for emergencies on that point of the ship. The computer interface that was linked to the bridge so that the coordinates of the ship could be shared free--

Wait.

Virgil sucked in a breath, trying not to curse out loud. The last thing he wanted to do was  _ tell Remus he was there.  _ Virgil's not an idiot--or at least not an idiot about this. Remus was dangerous and chaotic and cared about less than nothing. Roman said once that Remus wasn't happy unless he was covered in blood and that it didn't matter whose blood it was.

In a fight, there was no way that Virgil could take on Remus by himself. Erefrens were raised in a war based society that prided themselves on fighting techniques. If Remus was anything like Roman he'd always have a one up on Virgil, regardless of his deathworlder status and flight-or-flight instincts.

And Remus likes to fight dirty, messy, cruelly. From what Roman said.

In a Transport room late at night? With no one to supervise him?

The number of things he could be doing outnumbered the stars in all the galaxies, and Virgil was decently sure he wasn't exaggerating this time. If Remus was hanging out in the Transport room he'd know their coordinates and directions and it would be incredibly easy for him to contact any number of upsetting individuals to intercept them: pirates, mercenaries, species collectors that were never satisfied, serial killers with a taste for something new, government officials who would declare Virgil and Janus too dangerous to live or worse,  _ send them back to Earth.  _

Virgil moved slowly, dreading every step as he crept closer to the Transport room. He hugged the wall as he moved, carefully keeping his ears open for literally any noise that might give him a warning to what might be coming.

At first glance the Transport room door was closed. If Virgil had been walking around mostly sleep deprived and not on the lookout for anything out of place he wouldn’t have even noticed it. But there was a slim crack where it was open. Just enough for Virgil’s slim fingers to fit through it, just enough for Erefren claws, just enough for it to look closed and for it to be opened silently. 

There was no noise coming from inside: no soft voices, no evil laughter that Virgil had always imagined Remus liked to do. There wasn’t even the hum of the computer mainframe running, or footsteps that said someone was walking around.

Just a peek, Virgil told himself. To prove that Remus really was awake and had gone in there. To make sure that his family was safe. To show himself he wasn’t crazy.

He took another breath and slid the door open another inch.

The room was empty. Virgil hovered just to the right of the crack for a quisannu, with his heart beating in his throat. His eyes darted around the soft red lit room, and he tried his best not to think of all the horror movies where the crewmate that walked into the room alone died a horrible gruesome death and the flesh eating alien devoured his corpse. Air was silent and unmoving he watched the deepened maroon shadows for a sign that something was in them, something watching him, something biding time, something just a few breaths from fixing all of Virgil’s issues with a clean swipe of a bone plate across his throat.

It was…actually empty?

Virgil wedged his fingers in the crack more and slid the door all the way to the right, wincing when it rumbled slightly. In the thunderous quiet of the night, it sounded like a scream to his brain, and Virgil grit his teeth and rubbed the blood on his hand on his thigh because it wasn’t real and he needed to _ get a grip _ .

Virgil took a cautious step into the room, carefully keeping his feet light and the sound imaginary. He knew someone came in here, right? He didn’t just imagine the shadows skulking down the hall and disappearing in here, didn’t just misremember this door being usually closed, didn’t lose his mind while standing outside the door of his-- of Janus’s room. 

He, himself, hadn’t been in here since they had gotten back from the Pol’tur ship, bleeding and overwhelmed with emotions beyond the human capabilities of actually feeling them. The console that Logan usually manned hummed with low level power, still in stand-by mode until they needed it again, their watches were in their charging pads, the closet of their armored clothes was closed. The emergency escape pods were still locked in place. 

There was no sign of what could have made the noise, no sign of anyone having come in here, no sign of anything out of place. Virgil blew out a breath from his mouth, untensing his shoulders. There was nothing in here, certainly nothing that shouldn’t be there. 

He was just on edge from his nightmare. Seeing things. Letting his paranoid thoughts take over and drive him to acting impulsively.

Yeah. That.

But other than that he was fine!

Everything was  _ fine _ . 

Virgil rocked on his heels, and wiped his sweating, clammy hands on his thighs. He gave the room one more look and then turned around because it was far too late to be up and his heart was still beating too loud and if he hung around here for much longer he was going to lose his min---

Wait.

Virgil froze and swiveled back on his heel towards the corner where they kept some various travel bags-- to go bags for if they needed to abandon ship, raid bags for when they needed to teleport onto other ships and take back something that was stolen, day bags for when they landed on a planet and needed to go get supplies. 

Virgil had been the one to suggest the ready made bags. He was the one who put them together and set them up and organized them-- it had given him something productive to do before he could articulate in Common to the others that he had hobbies. Logan had helped him, in the beginning, when Virgil was unfamiliar with a Skrad healing pad and how it worked, or with the ration packs, or what the hell a griot looked like. 

Virgil had made and maintained all the bags.

So why was there an extra one there?

Virgil took a tentative step towards it, then another, and another until he was right beside the extra bag. It wasn’t anything super fancy. In fact, it looked like one of Roman’s older bags. Lost and forgotten in the mess that was the Erefren’s room.

((Virgil had found, funnily enough, that Roman  _ collected  _ bags almost as much as swords. He had a bag for every occasion, bedazzled and personalized and made to fit around his bone plates while keeping up with the latest fashion trends from every solar system they visited. When Logan had explained that Virgil was attempting to put together prepared travel bags he had been hesitant, but then had gotten excited to show off his amazing collection. Virgil had never seen so many bags before in his life-- and that included the time Janus shoved him into his mother’s walk in closet to hide him for a minsannu when they were stealing blue grey towels to dry themselves off after an impromptu late night swimming lesson.))

The bag itself was worn and a deep blue, like a gym duffle bag but made out of some fabric that felt to Virgil’s fingers like a heavy flannel. It was filled, nearly bulging and the awkward shape of it had made the shadow that caught Virgil’s eye in the first place. He cautiously kicked it with his foot, skidding back a step in case whatever was inside it was actually alive and going to eat him and oh god that would be the  _ worst  _ way to go-- he could see it already, the lumpy creature being some type of Sblorp and it would sink its crosshair fangs directly into Virgil’s throat, cutting off a scream before it could get out and his blood would splatter all over the walls, the floor the ceiling and the last thing he’d see before he died would be the creepy eyes of it staring down at him, not a hint of remorse and it would probably be fitting because that was how six other aliens had died under Virgil’s shaky han--

The bag did not move. Virgil reached up his left hand and rubbed his neck, trying to get rid of the phantom feeling of blood and pain and didn’t actually exist because he was fine and it wasn’t real.

He took another breath and he was mostly certain the copper taste on his tongue was only in his head.

“I’m going to regret this,” Virgil said, as softly as he could.

And then he snuck back to the bag and knelt down beside it. He took another breath and then he grabbed the zipper and yanked it back.

The bag had… a lot of things. Virgil frowned as he took a mental inventory and shifted through the items with careful hands. He thought he vaguely recognized the stuff in it from around the ship: an interspace nook that they normally kept in the Comms room, a pocket light knife that must have wandered away from Roman’s collection, rations from the kitchen that probably wouldn’t be missed on account of how old they were, one of the throw blankets from the common area that Virgil actually had noticed was missing but thought Patton had just taken it to be cleaned again, a bottle of some alien drink that Virgil had seen stuffed away in the back of Logan’s lab which Virgil had never seen him actually drink from and had never asked what it was. There were clothes, too, although in the darkness Virgil couldn’t make out if they Roman’s or Logan’s or his own. 

It was… Virgil sat back on his haunches for a moment. 

Oh. He knew what this was.

He’d had one before. 

It wasn’t an emergency bag like he thought. It was a  _ Go bag.  _ As in “escape and never look back” bag, as in “I don’t feel safe here” bag, as in “you won’t notice I’ve stolen anything until I’m gone and by then you’ll never find me again” bag.

Which meant that Virgil needed to  _ go  _ now because he really didn’t want to know what would happen if he got caught all by himself in the middle of the night, in an area of the ship that no one ever comes to unless necessary and poking at a bag he most likely shouldn’t know exists because people who have this type of bag tended to--

And just as he had the thought, something heavy and powerful wrapped around his throat and dragged him up into the air. Virgil’s mouth opened for a scream, but there was a quick jab to his gut and all the air in his lungs escaped and left him frantically gasping. His feet swung violently in the void but there was nothing to kick against and his fingers clawed at the tail squeezing around his windpipe but the leathery skin was thicker than his nails and the jagged bone plates threatened to break skin along with his neck and fix that breathing problem he had permanently. 

"Oh?" said an all-too-calm voice from above him, hiding in the fucking rafters like a Reytin.

Virgil gasped desperately for air, as black dots danced in his vision, panic stealing all rational thought from him. His lungs screamed almost as loudly as his brain was: pleading and crying and screeching for help that wasn't going to come because he was the idiot that didn't bother to wake any of the others. "Wait! P-please!”

The tail around his neck felt like a noose, tightening and he wasn’t sure if his neck was going to be able to remain unbroken for much longer against the gravity of the ship. 

“Re...mus!” Virgil begged.

Remus Prince, the Erefren who was responsible for setting several ambushes on them, for sending space pirates to nearly kill them, for stealing and pillaging and murdering most of the way through this galaxy and the next, just smiled down at him from where he was lounging completely unconcerned. "Why, hello there! The  _ other  _ Deathworlder! I've been meaning to get you all alone!"

His grin was filled with sharp teeth and Virgil kicked his feet harder for something,  _ anything  _ that would give him purchase.

“Now,” Remus continued. “Why don’t we have a nice,  _ friendly  _ chat!” 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Roman loved hearing tales about creatures like you,” Remus said casually, like his voice alone wasn’t causing complete terror to crawl up Virgil’s throat and yank out his tongue. “They always made you guys sound like juggernauts. Unkillable beasts. Gods. When Roman was ten revolutions old he said he was going to exterminate all the Deathworlders so that no one else would be scared anymore.”
> 
> Remus looked down at Virgil and his eyes were empty abysses larger than black holes and colder than them too.
> 
> “Doesn’t look like he did too well on that front,” Remus said. “Guess I oughta help him with that.”  
> ***  
> aka, Remus whaT ARE YOU DOING?!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for talk of murder, forced suicide although no actual death occurs, and non-con drugging.

“Certainty” wasn’t something that Virgil had in excess of all the way out in Space. There were always so many things he didn’t know, didn’t understand, didn't think to think of. He was constantly having to rework his understanding of planets and governmental structures and alien niceties because he just didn’t know what he was doing. Roman, Patton, and Logan sometimes forgot that he didn’t grow up learning about interplanetary wars and peace treaties and trading policies and it always came as a shock to them when he had to ask what the hell they were talking about. Virgil lived and breathed by trial and error and tried his very hardest not to do the error part.

So certainty was hard to come by these days.

However, he _was_ certain that if Remus didn’t let him go in the next five minsannu Virgil’s lungs were going to implode and his neck was going to snap and he was going to be a very unhappy ghost.

The dust was not grey, Virgil thought, even as he saw the flutters of it flash on the back of his eyelids, imprinted like scars on his brain that just wouldn’t heal over. The dust was not grey and it wasn’t real because there was no dust on Roman’s ship and-- _oh god he was going to die and they weren’t going to find his body._

Remus’s tail jerked and Virgil felt where the muscle tightened and the half regrown bone plates rotated in return, like knives all on their own. Virgil was pretty sure that his hands were bloody messes from trying to get between the mass and his throat, trying to loosen it a bit, trying to get air to his lungs and his feet back to the ground and his body somewhere that wasn’t _there._

His head felt like it was full of fuzz, full of buzzing and screeching and alarms. Even in the darkness he could make out Remus’s face watching him with deep dark eyes that were twisted paradies of Roman’s, because Virgil had seen Roman’s so often, so much and associated them with the driven determination that bordered on self sacrifice and these _weren’t those eyes._

Despite them being the same murky brown, Remus’s eyes different; there was something in them that Virgil’s panicking brain was screaming about, something that made his grin sinister where Roman’s was always charming, something that told Virgil Remus would _enjoy_ watching the light leave his eyes. Something that told Virgil his own dull reflection in those eyes would be the last thing he saw before he passed on.

And Virgil _did not come all this way to die because of Remus-- fucking-- Prince._

Really! At this point it would be a _fucking insult_ to die becuase of an Erefren in the middle of space because he was too stupid to just go back to sleep and pretend like he didn’t need to see a space therapist for the traumatic-borderline-stupid nightmares he kept having.

He’d survived the accusation of murdering his best-friend-maybe-more, survived the humiliation of being stripped of everything that he owned by aliens, survived the Welsor Fighting Rings _six fucking times_ , survived the mercanaries, the bounty hunters, the government agents-- everything that had come after him and his family in the past two years. He survived the Pol’turs and he survived getting Janus _back._

He survived that, and no one was ever going to know about it because in the end Remus was going to send his lifeless corpse out the airlock because it was _that_ easy to get rid of the evidence when you lived in Space. No wonder the space police went around trying to catch them with illegal merchandise. It wasn’t like they could prove or solve _murder--_

He gasped for air that couldn’t fit in his fiery lungs, and his eyes felt a bit like they were going to pop right out of his head with the pounding pressure building up from a heartbeat that he couldn’t keep going. His vision blurred, bubbled and popped until all he could see were blobs in the darkness. Unrecognizable blobs. His legs kicked, jerked, swung...fell... and... his... hands…drop...pe...d….

  
  


Virgil gasped for air like a drowning man-- or a suffocated one. His lungs burned hotter than any star he’d ever had the pleasure of hearing Logan ramble about. His head swam in the agony, in the stimuli that screamed from so many places that he couldn’t even see what was in front of him. He was faintly aware of his shuddering chest, of his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, and the raspy feeling of oxygen tearing through his esophagus like a pair of dull scissors through felt, handled by a second grader who’s fingers weren’t big enough to grip them properly.

His limbs were moving-- or rather being moved, but the moment the thought came to him was the moment he was also pressing his cheek against the cold polyfurnish flooring to alleviate at least one of the alerts in his brain. He thought he was crying, too. Crying over air that he didn’t think had ever been so sweet.

“Deathworlder, huh?” A voice said from over him, and Virgil tried to kick at it, only to find his legs weren’t moving quite right when the action jerked at his wrists and nearly dislodged his arms from their sockets and that was not good. “I used to think you guys were cool as fuck. Then I _met_ one.”

Virgil coughed and curled in on himself, but his arms were trapped behind his back, and his shoulders cried weakly at the movement while his bloody fingers twitched. He shoved his face into the floor again, in a move that he thought probably looked really pitiful-- like if he couldn’t see the blob towering over him with a too-sharp-too-many-teeth grin, then Remus would just stop being there altogether.

Instead Remus’s foot came out and nudged his face. And then he kicked at Virgil’s knees and forced his body to twist until he was mostly facing upwards with his soft insides ready for plucking straight out of his stomach. His chest shuddered again, and his wrists yanked against whatever it was that Remus had bound him up with-- Virgil didn’t recognize the feeling of the material, but he was only used to being bound by polyfurnish chains that could absorb heat from an imploding star itself and metal handcuffs rom when the police wanted to pick him up for questioning for the second time in a week for something like jaywalking and ended up asking what he did to Janus Ekans anyway.

Whatever this was, it felt more like… like… fabric. Roman’s sash, or a T-shirt, but strong enough that there was no give, or knotted enough that Virgil’s stupid monkey brain couldn’t figure out how to undo it before Remus decided how to undo _him._

Remus for his part just watched him for a minsannu, quisannu, phisannu-- Long enough that Virgil’s breath didn’t get any stronger and he couldn’t scream for help because of it. Remus crouched at his knees, draping his arms over his kneecaps, watched Virgil’s chest shake with a fascination while his fucking tail wagged in the background. Virgil caught sight of a dark liquid on one of the bone plates when it crossed into the line of red light and his entire body wracked with attempts to put distance between himself and Remus.

“Not so tough now, are you?” Remus said.

“Pl...eas…” Virgil gasped. “Fu..ck…Remus…”

Remus smiled wider, his lips cracking apart his face to show off all three rows of teeth that encircled his mouth and throat, sharpened like daggers. There was a chasm where his face should have been and Virgil tried to shove with his feet again, but they just yanked on his hands and forced his shoulders farther back like some type of back-fucking-bend. 

“Roman loved hearing tales about creatures like you,” Remus said casually, like his voice alone wasn’t causing complete terror to crawl up Virgil’s throat and yank out his tongue. “They always made you guys sound like juggernauts. Unkillable beasts. _Gods_. When Roman was ten revolutions old he said he was going to exterminate all the Deathworlders so that no one else would be scared anymore.”

Remus looked down at Virgil and his eyes were empty abysses larger than black holes and colder than them too.

“Doesn’t look like he did too well on that front,” Remus said. “Guess I oughta help him with that.”

Remus’s hand reached out suddenly-- but Virgil’s brain saw it in slow motion, like Remus was reaching through a bowl of Shishdouble to wrap his claws around Virgil’s throat again. Virgil babbled out something, begging, pleading, and his bruised and sore body writhed against his bonds and the floor in desperate, hopeless movements.

((Virgil never wondered what worms felt like when they were plucked out of the ground and suspended in the air. He wasn’t pleased to know.))

Remus’s fingers were cold-- cold like ice that Janus had once shoved down his back in the middle of the night while they were sneaking food from the kitchen, cold like the metal chair he’d been forced to sit in while police officers and detectives asked him the same questions over and over and over again, cold like the endless expanse of space that surrounded their very tiny ship in the perfect graveyard for souls no one would remember to miss.

Virgil could feel each of Remus’s fingers pressing over his heaving throat. His claws were close to breaking Virgil’s tissue paper skin and his thumb sat right on Virgil’s pulse feeling for the way his hummingbird heart struggled to keep Virgil functioning. Just a squeeze and Virgil would be gone, just a curl of fingers and his blood would be all over the floor, just a twitch and Virgil would never have to think about the difference between grey and blue or what the last thing he said to Janus was.

“But you know,” Remus said. “I’m a pretty generous guy! I’ll give you one chance to convince me not to!”

“Fu..ck…” Virgil managed. “You.”

Remus brought up his other hand, and Virgil reactively squeezed his eyes closed. His heart stuttered, stuttered, stopped in his frantic chest, holding and waiting for the pain from whatever Remus was going to do to him for that; his claws were sharp enough to drag down Virgil’s cheeks, to cut out his tongue, to carve out his eyes--

But in the end all he did was use a finger to lift one of Virgil strands of hair off his sweat drenched forehead. 

“That’s not very convincing at all.”

Virgil wanted to hiss at him, something threatening and violent like the Deathworlders of all the tales Remus was thinking of. But his mouth was dry, and all he could see was the last row of teeth in Remus’s mouth. He had never wished so badly that he was bad at math: because surely if he wasn’t able to count every inch between Remus’s pointed teeth and his own throat, then it wouldn’t be happening, right?

“Hmmm,” Remus said, possibly delightedly when Virgil’s voice failed him and his lungs begged for a mercy that Virgil couldn’t provide, because breathing means movement and the dumb rabbit part of his brain kept insisting that if he didn’t move, Remus wouldn’t see him. “Maybe I’ll just leave you here, Cikeriy-tied. Can you squeal, little Cikeriy? Squeal for me?”

Virgil didn’t make a sound, and honestly he wasn’t sure if that was the best move or not: angring Remus when he was already so close to death by not playing along with his sick-as-fuck game verses keeping what little diginity he had managed to retain after the Welsor Fighting Rings. Virgil’s throat tasted like blood coated dust and the bonds around his wrists and ankles dug into his skin the same way the chains at the Rings would, before Logan had come and freed him.

Instead he squeezed his eyes closed, counted to a frantic, unprovable five, and then he lunged straight up with all of his might. Remus didn’t have time to drop him, or move back and Virgil gladly took the blossoming pain in his forehead as payment for at least wiping that smug grin off the alien’s face as he hit the floor again.

Remus cursed in Erefreian, sounding a lot like Virgil’s Spanish Teacher when she saw the results after her quizzes and realized that bar Perfect Janus Ekans, no one was going to be passing her class that year. Remus pulled away and the red dulled light from the hall painted him in an astonishingly terrifying light. Virgil snarled at him the best he could when his heart was pounding in his ears and all he wanted was to scream for help but the words choked in his throat.

((Because if he screams, he thinks someone might come. And that would be a sight to see, wouldn’t it? Patton or Logan or Roman throwing open the door just in time to see Remus slice his throat open and spray his blood all over the Computer console? Virgil could forgive himself for a lot of things, but causing his family to think “if they had only been a little faster” was where he drew every single line every single time.))

Remus’s claws came back from his forehead, shamefully lacking any blood, though there might have been some type of bruising. Not that it would matter much considering the thickness of Erefreian skin; Remus wouldn’t even feel it in a few quisannu and no one else would ever know. He laughed, short, quick, and breathy and Virgil almost thought that he might be surprised. 

_“Oh,”_ Remus said and Virgil didn’t know what that meant, and didn’t think he wanted to find out.

He twisted his fingers and grabbed a hold of the knot tying his feet to his arms with the little give that there was. His hamstrings whined at the pull but Virgil only needed a minasunnu to create the 3D model in his head so that he knew where to wriggle and where to pull and where to curl-- like the worst kind of interactive puzzle and if he failed, he was going to die.

No pressure.

Virgil yanked his arms free just as Remus lunged for him again. He rolled and the alien hit the floor heavily where he’d been, with his tail already swinging at where Virgil was going, which was hilarious on some level because not even Virgil knew where he was going, but Remus seemed to predict it anyway. The bone plates on the edge of his tail were sharpened and they carved violent arcs into the wall in front of Virgil forcing him deeper into the room and farther from any sort of help.

He blocked the way to the only exit and Virgil scrambled backwards until he felt the floor vent that circled about two feet from the escape pods under his shoes. His chest heaved, and his vision danced between being hyper focused on every detail about Remus and being blurred so badly Virgil couldn’t have seen his own hand in front of his face. Distantly his fingers were aching with the cuts from the bone plates already, his blood made it hard to concentrate on the here-and-now and not the there-and-then.

((The Dust is not real. The blood is his own. There were no screaming crowds, no beaming sun, no grit under his nails--))

The floor was clear, he was empty handed, and while Virgil’s handprint, however bloody, could probably open the doors to an escape pod behind him, he didn’t think he’d be able to close them before Remus could follow after. Virgil’s head rang from the earlier impact, turning his carefully cultivated plans to fragments in his head with nothing to do. He was cornered in the worst part of the ship, with the worst person to be cornered with. 

Remus was grinning again, crouching on the floor like a lion about to pounce, but wanted to have his fun first.

“What’s your plan here?” Remus asked. “Gonna call for help, little Cikeriy? Go on! I’d love to see the look on your face when you realize no one is going to come for you.”

“What… did… you do?” Virgil said between gasps. The chill of the ship cut through his thin sleep shirt, and made his skin feel too small, too little, not enough. Roman had been okay at dinner earlier, he knew-- a little more tired than normal, a little more snappish but he’d been that way since he had taken to keeping Remus away from anything important around the ship all day every day, because he didn’t trust Remus around any of the rest of them. Patton had made ten puns, which was one less than usual but Virgil had thought it was just because Logan had been excitedly telling them about--something fuck, a star? A research paper? Janus had kissed him like a nebula exploding and wished him a good night.

They’d been fine. Virgil had made sure of it. There was nothing that Remus could have--

And yet Remus’s grin etched wider, crueler, violenter. “Do you know the main difference between me and your lovely little Prince of the Stars? Other than the fact that I’m just the sexier twin, of course. I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t know. Roman doesn’t like to talk about the family disappointment.”

Virgil took a step back and Remus took one forward, like a game of tag. His tail swayed behind him looking deceivingly lackadaisical for a murder weapon.

“You see little Crikeriy--” Remus said with his eyes glinting at the nickname. “Erefrens like to fight, and your little Princey over there is the perfect little soldier! A killing machine when he isn’t so concerned about messing up his hair! Those toxins of his? Wowza! They’ve always packed a _punch._ Even when we were kids!”

Virgil didn’t like how he said _punch_. He didn’t like the way that Remus talked about Roman. He didn’t like the implication that Roman used those toxins on Remus before. He didn’t like the idea of anyone screaming the way that Orlen thief had back when he’d first seen Roman use it effectively.

He didn’t like the way Remus’s head tilted, like he was remembering the feeling of all his atoms igniting on fire and wanted to see if Virgil could feel that way, too.

“The pack was _so proud_ the first time his toxins came in,” Remus said. “Much less proud when mine came in; after all what is causing immeasurable pain to your enemies compared to simply putting them to fucking sleep?”

Virgil jerked back another step and Remus took a generous one forward. 

“It’s not glamorous enough,” Remus said, something slipping into his tone, dark and heavy and bloody. “That’s what they told me, my _pack._ There’s no honor in killing someone who’s asleep. No honor gained from resisting the pain when there’s no pain at all. It didn’t matter _who_ I could knock out with just a drop of my toxins; I was always going to be nothing compared to _Roman._ He took my pack from me-- so I told myself I’d take his from him too. And I’d use my toxins to do it.”

“You…put them…?” Virgil dug his nails into his palms, his fingers sticking together in the excess of blood. “When... ?”

Remus laughed, “What, you think that anyone on this ship pays attention to what they’re eating? Roman is so wrapped up in his little fantasy that nothing can go wrong for him that he never notices when I put things in his drinks. Patton and Logan were _child’s play._ The only hard one was Janus-- ya never know with you Deathworlders what’s gonna work and what’s just gonna make you drowsy.” 

“You _drugged_ them,” Virgil said, and fought not to think about Janus on the Pol’tur ship struggling to keep his mind focused and so out of it that he nearly knifed Patton when the Reytin was trying to help him, about Janus’s disbelieving eyes when he saw Virgil there and thought it was more likely he was a figment than real, about Janus clinging to him afterwards when they were back on their own ship and Janus didn’t want to fall asleep lest Virgil disappear before he woke back up. “You-- You--!” 

Remus looked immensely pleased with the fact, with his wording, with his _anger_ , which made Virgil’s stomach roll all over again. Remus drugged his friends, his family, _Janus_. He drugged them and didn’t seem to look in any way sorry about it.

“Why not me?” Virgil choked out around the way his head was ringing, the way his blood was singing, the way that his fingers were curling and imagining the _thump_ of a pulse under his thumbs, preferably Remus’s.

Remus flexed his fingers, his claws clinking together in a way that made the hair on the back of Virgil’s neck stand on end, even more than before. “Weren’t you listening? It’s not very fun _talking_ to someone who’s dead asleep, now is it? Asleep people don’t scream the way awake people do.”

Wasn’t that ironic? Virgil’s heart thundered and he took solace in the idea that at least Remus had never been near him when he slept.

“I’m not going to scream,” Virgil said. 

“That’s what they all think,” Remus said back.

“I’m not going to scream,” Virgil said, this time with more confidence than he thought he’d ever had before in his life. Stronger than when he’d told Janus that they were going to be friends regardless of what their parents thought, stronger than when he told the police that _Janus was not dead,_ stronger than when he swore to Logan that he was happy here, with them. He wasn’t certain of a lot in space but he was certain of this.

“I’m not going to scream, and you’re not going to get away with whatever the _fuck_ it is you think you’re doing right now.”

He planted his feet on the ground and squared his trembling fists into something that resembled a fighting stance-- not that it was anything official, not that it was anything _good_ , but it was the stance that he had picked up from the Fighting Rings and if he survived that, he was going to survive Remus Prince with it, too, regardless of what his lungs and throat and brain were telling him. 

Remus didn’t say anything for a quisannu. In the ruby light and the surplus of shadows it was hard to make out exactly what expression he was holding in his eyes, but Virgil hated how eerily similar it looked to Roman when he was trying to outsmart Logan with wordplay. 

“Boorrringgg,” the Erefren decided suddenly, drawing out the syllables until they grated around Virgil’s brain and didn’t sound like actual Common at all.

“What?”

“You’re boring,” Remus said, flicking his tail. “I’m bored.”

 _“It’s the worst when he’s bored,”_ Roman had said once upon a time so long ago when Virgil had first asked what the hell a Remus was and why they seemed to like sending waves of assassins and bounty hunters and pirates after them. _“Things tend to get… bloody when he’s bored.”_

Virgil whose fingers were pulsing from cuts, who’s throat was aching, who could taste copper in his mouth and see specs of scarlet in the dim hall light whether they were real or not, thought that _maybe_ things were already a little bloody. And if that was what it was like before Remus was bored, Virgil really wasn’t going to like whatever was coming.

“I’m not here for your entertainment,” Virgil spat.

“Aren’t you?” Remus grinned again and Virgil flinched at the sight of it. His head screamed at him to get away, get out, get _help_. But the exit was blocked and Virgil didn’t want to know what Remus would do to anyone who came running to help him, if they came at all. “I can’t think of another reason to keep a little Deathworlder around, you know. You’re all like dangerous little pets no one else wants to get close to. I was thinking when I go off again, I’m gonna take Janus with me-- he’s pretty funny you know, especially when that Sblorp bit him and he was begging us to get it off him.”

((“ _It was my fault,”_ Janus had said in a medical bay on the floor, trusting Virgil’s shaking hands to touch when he had no logical reason to. “ _I didn’t even see the thing until it was two inches from tearing out my large intestine.”))_

And Remus was saying that was _funny?_ That he _let that happen?_ That if Remus hadn’t taken pity and helped get it off of Janus _Virgil would have never found him again because he’d be dead on some forgotten planet?_

Virgil’s nails dug into his palms, just to keep his brain focused on the present and keep himself from doing something _extremely stupid,_ like lauching himself across the room at the smug Erefren and removing each and every bone from his body as painfully as possible.

“No,” Virgil said.

“No?”

“No!” He said again, “I’m not letting you take Janus.”

Not Janus who still smiled like Virgil hung the stars in the sky, who kissed like he wanted the whole cosmos to know Virgil was his, who had always been the strongest person Virgil had ever known. He didn’t care who Remus thought he was, didn’t care if Janus had been coerced to be part of Remus’s crew before, didn’t care at all. That was _Janus_ and Virgil would not let Remus do anything else to him.

He was certain of that.

“Oh? And what if he _wants_ to go with me?” Remus asked, like there was dimension out there where Janus might say yes anyway, where Janus had lost all his sense of self preservation among the nebulas, where Virgil wasn’t ready to claw through the fabrics of space and time and life and death just to make sure Janus didn’t have to.

Virgil tasted blood in the back of his throat, felt the grit in his teeth, smelled the burning of flesh in the air.

“Why would he _ever_ want to go with you? If this is the shit you pull on him? If you’re going to get him killed just because you’re not being entertained? His life is worth more than that and I won’t let you convince him otherwise.”

Remus’s eyes narrowed: dark and dangerous and Virgil’s chest ached with the need to _breathe_ but he ignored it. Alarms rang in the back of Virgil’s mind, singing out warnings that Virgil himself couldn’t even make out because if he took any of his concentration from Remus for a minsannu, everything around him would implode. 

“Oh? Well, what about this, little Cikeriy,” the alien said, speaking deliberately slowly so that Virgil couldn’t misunderstand him even if he wanted to. “Let’s play a game, just you and me. I’ll leave Janus all alone, I’ll leave Roman and Patton and Logan all alone, too! When we touch down on TS-625, I’ll take my lovely bag of tricks that you just found and I’ll disappear completely and none of them will have to see me again! Your perfect little pack here can sleep safely knowing that I’m not going to send anymore mercenaries or bounty hunters or government agents after all of you! Doesn’t that sound nice, Cikeriy? I’ll even swear to the great god Disney to never bother them again-- on one condition.”

Virgil’s heart thudded so loudly in his chest he almost couldn't _see_ . Remus’s smile was sharper than a knife, sharper than any of his bone plates, sharper than anything that Virgil had even felt and it cut right through his flesh like it was made of _melted butter._

Remus splayed out his hands and wiggled his claws in the darkness. 

“You just turn right around, get into that escape pod, and _eject yourself into space._ ”

His lungs screamed as he became violently aware of the presence of the silent escape pods bearing witness to all this behind him. The pods that weren’t furnished with any provisions, that didn’t have any of his stuff because it was all in a bag that was behind Remus, that Virgil suspected weren’t made for humans at all and wouldn’t be capable of regulating the right amount of oxygen for his body for an extended period of time. The pods that Virgil had practiced piloting on a million times but had always flown right back here within the phisannu, because this was where he belonged. This was _home._

Remus wanted him to purposely leave that? He wanted to watch Virgil cast himself into the empty expanse because it would be entertaining somehow? Virgil’s knees felt weak, his stomach offered up hints of the dinner they had all eaten together phisannus ago. 

He’d have no food. He’d have no water. He’d barely have oxygen if he went.

And if he didn’t starve out there, or dehydrate, or run out of oxygen, and if the SOS system _worked,_ then he’d be found by someone out there. If they weren’t pirates or smugglers that would sell him without a second thought, they’d be with the Universal Space Police Force and _humans were illegal on this side of the universe._

If he did this it would be a _suicide trip._

“It should be an easy decision for you, right? You or the others,” Remus said. “You or _Janus?”_

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Virgil hissed, and it felt like he was choking again, like Remus’s tail was hoisting in him to the air by his neck, like there was something in his throat that was blocking all the oxygen from making it to his chest. His hands were shaking and there was no hiding that. 

Remus stood at his full height, and he looked like he was having the time of his life all of a sudden. The red light made his smile look _insane_.

And for the first time, Virgil thought that maybe that wasn’t entirely wrong. 

Virgil didn’t know what growing up as an Erefren was like-- Roman was staunchy with the details and Logan and Patton were insistent that it was only Roman’s story to tell, despite them knowing it entirely. Virgil had wondered quietly, why someone whose species was supposed to travel in packs--teams-- families-- why Roman was floating out in space as a swashbuckling starlit hero without anyone else of his kind. Virgil had wondered.

He thought maybe he understood now, if Remus was the type to play this kind of sick game with people close to Roman, that Roman had left those people behind on a planet that Remus probably wouldn’t go back to. He understood why Roman had nearly begged them not to uphold the Oath of Brothers that Remus had enacted to get himself saved. He understood now, if it had been someone else with their backs to the escape pods being asked to make a decision like this. 

He understood Roman not wanting to talk about Remus when Remus was asking him to choose between the people he loved and himself like the answer was something he had to even think about in the first place.

“Come on, Virgie,” Remus said. “Entertain me a bit. You know not even I will risk going back on an oath to the Great God. Unless, of course, you really don't care about your friends all that much after all.”

“Make the oath first,” Virgil said.

“Open the pod first,” Remus countered, like he was waiting for it. His tail twitched, flicked and danced in the air like a creature all of its own. Remus tilted his head to the side, letting some of his wavy hair fall over his eyes, and once upon a time Virgil might have thought that made him look a bit like Roman.

Instead it made Virgil’s stomach clench and twist and crawl up his throat real slow like it’s own little horror movie. It was deceptive, it was cruel; he didn’t look like someone who would kill anyone and everyone for his own entertainment, who took joy in making Virgil bleed late at night when there was no one but them to see.

He didn’t look like that guy they saved on the Pol’tur ship who could barely keep his eyes open, but demanded that they also save what was left of his crew. Virgil didn’t know where that person went, or if he’d been real at all. But the terror in his chest and the bruises on his neck told him the Erefren in front of him was as authentic as it got.

Virgil took the last step back and his shoulder blades hit the outer door to escape pod Alfie-- Alpha. Virgil vaguely remembered that first time that he and Roman had done their driving practices out there in the middle of an empty quadrant, in the middle of nowhere and nothing. It had been just like Janus and him picking out some empty parking lot at two AM for Janus to go through teaching him how to drive because his own parents couldn’t have been bothered. Patton had affectionately named the little pod Alfie, and gone through the trouble of renaming the pod in the computer system with an alien-like flower emoji to make Virgil smile. Logan had rolled his eyes, but had yet to change it back.

The memory tasted like his own stomach acids now, burning its way up his throat, and making his whole body feel feverish. He thought that if he closed his eyes and took a break from staring at Remus, he’d see Patton and his bug eyes staring up at him with a question on his lips ~~and _“Oh kiddo how could you?”_ ~~

Virgil reached up and crossed his body to slam his palm on the palm reader without giving Remus access to his spine, without trusting Remus enough not to slam his tail into Virgil’s lower back when he was already complying, without letting his eyes close because he wasn’t going to cry after all this.

He survived the fighting rings. He survived Earth. He survived to find Janus again and see that smile that Virgil breathed every breath for. He survived this much.

He’d survive Remus too and he wouldn’t let Remus think otherwise for a _quisannu._

The scanner was warm under his palm. For a moment there, Virgil was afraid that it wouldn’t recognize his human shaped hand amidst all the blood. ((He remembered when Logan first dragged him to the room to get his hand put into the system, an induction to the crew, back before Roman trusted him and Patton was still skittish and Virgil’s grasp of Common was barely more than the basics of conversation and necessity. Logan had been blinking lights a million ways, shining like a star all on his own, and it had taken Virgil too long to realize the dancing of his lower arms was because he was excited and happy and thrilled and that _Virgil_ had made him that way. So different from the yesterday morning when Logan’s voice had dripped with an emptiness and _“Did we make you unhappy?” ))_

The scanner beeped. The doors slid open. Virgil swallowed the lump in his throat like it was a chunk of a meteor and the edges were carving into his esophagus. 

Remus didn’t take the step forward to push him into the pod with his aura like Virgil expected. His tail froze motionless in the air beside him, more like a cardboard cut out prop than the weapon that shredded the wall to his right. The alien raised his left hand slowly, in something that looked so normal _,_ so familiar _,_ so _human,_ that Virgil had to swallow the hysteria before it gained a hold on his tongue.

“I, Remus Prince, Denounced of the Prince Pack, Leader of None and Follower of Less,” Remus said, and the air in the room rang with his voice. Virgil willed back the weakness in his knees that threatened to send him to the ground at the rumbling of his tone. “I invoke the Great God Disney, Beholder of Oaths and Judge of Heroes, to witness here and now this vow: I swear to abandon my pledge to destroy all that my brother, Roman Prince, holds dear and resolve not to take human Janus Ekans with me when I leave, should human Virgil Storm press the eject button on the escape pod while inside it.”

Remus turned his palm upwards and tilted his head ever so slightly with a smug expression, nearly hidden in the shadows. “Does that work for you, Cikeriy?”

((“Does that work for you, Virgil?” Roman had said, when Virgil was frantically trying to wash blood off his hands in the bathroom and not crawl out of his skin. Virgil hadn’t been paying attention to anything other than getting the alien fluids off of himself, getting the feeling of a pulse dying under his fingers to fade, getting his breath to stop hitching at every inhale. There were a million other things that Roman should have been doing at the moment: helping Patton from where he was nearly shish kabobed, checking on Logan who they had to forcibly put to sleep because he couldn’t stop screaming at the brightness of the world around them once his visor broke, getting the blood off himself, getting rid of the bodies in the hall… but Roman was here talking to Virgil about everything and nothing and reaching out to turn off the water when Virgil wouldn’t stop scrubbing at his hands. _“Listen to me Virgil. You’re okay here. You’re safe. I’m not going to let anything happen.”_ ))

Virgil was shaking so much he wasn’t sure that he actually nodded at Remus’s non-rhetorical question. It felt barbed, it felt cold and vicious of him to ask, and Virgil thought that maybe that was the point of it. Remus’s teeth bared in a parody of something comforting.

It was the same smile that Mayor Ekans had been holding when he had Virgil forcibly ejected from the mansion the first time, the same smile that his teachers had when they gave him yet another detention, the same smile that the police officers gave him when they thought they had caught him in a lie about what had happened to Beloved Perfect Janus Ekans.

There were less than two halls between him and Janus’s bedroom, less two quisannu to get from here to that room where Janus was sleeping unaware of anything that was happening, less than eighteen days that he got to spend with Janus in the grand scheme of things. 

It felt like a blink, like a mirage, like a dream that Virgil just woke up from and was feeling the blissfulness dissipate like he’d faced so many times before. The Hope had always been the worst thing about those first eight months: the hope that Janus would appear somewhere unconscious but alive, the hope that Janus would show up to clear his name, the hope that Janus would come back just to fix everything that had gone wrong with Virgil’s life when he was gone. 

Virgil, ever the fool, had fallen into the trap that was Hope again and let himself get comfy with the idea that this time he couldn’t lose Janus again.

“Tick Tock,” Remus said.

“You know, Remus,” Virgil spit out, “I feel sorry for you.”

“That’s nice.”

“You clearly never learned what the fuck it was like to care about anyone other than yourself, and I as much as I would like to hate ever fiber of your being, the only thing I can feel is pity that you--” 

“Really, these are gonna be your last words?” Remus cut in with an undertone of something far less entertained.

“There are a billion civilizations out there!” Virgil said over him. “And you couldn’t find one person in there that you could care about? You couldn’t let go of such a stupid hatred of your brother-- for a pack that didn’t deserve you-- for a life that you don’t even know if you would have liked! You had all of Space for yourself and you chained yourself up just to get a chance to get back at Roman? How the fuck are you so _stupid_? Do you know what I would have given to be you?”

Remus wasn’t smiling.

Virgil thought that he was. Grinning full of adrenaline and shaking with rage and wondering if he would ever taste Janus’s lips again because certainty in Space was a fickle thing. 

“You had a spaceship. You had a crew. You could have gone anywhere and done anything with your life,” Virgil said. “And yet you chose to constantly come back to _Roman_. Dumbass.”

Remus made a noise in the back of his throat that sounded like a grumbling, a rumbling, a _growling._ Virgil flinched back into the pod, and he could already feel the artificial gravity loosening its hold. It took him another blink to realize that Remus was _laughing_ at him, something darker and more dangerous than before.

He was insane and having fun before. Virgil thought that he might have just taken out the “having fun” and substituted in the “pissed off”.

“You know how long I’ve been thinking about this, _Virgil_ ?” Remus asked. “I went over a hundred different ways that I could have done this: I could have had you hang yourself, snapping your own neck. Could have given you the knife and told you to slit your own throat. Could have tossed you a Kochfas and told you to blow your brains out. I thought about making the others _watch._ And I wanted to see you do it _so badly._ Do you know what a pain it was to walk around these past disannu and see you with your guard completely down? To think of all the ways I would have killed you myself? I could have slit your throat and laughed as Patton screamed. But you know those rumors about Deathworlds say that you might have gotten up from that and I don’t ever want to see your _stupid_ face again.”

Virgil’s chest heaved. He couldn’t tell if it was the thinner oxygen concentration in the pod, or just the rapid fire words in Remus’s mouth. The words that confirmed a suspicion that Virgil hadn’t realized he’d had this whole time. That this whole thing was too complex, too focused, too targeted. 

“Oh? Nothing else to say?” Remus asked. “You were almost entertaining there for a moment.”

“This wasn’t about Roman, was it?” Virgil said. “This was about me. You hate _me_.”

Remus stuck out his tongue and pressed a claw to it-- some type of motion that Virgil only recognized from the number of times that Roman had done it to Logan’s back after he stated something incredibly obvious and Patton had batted his thigh over. 

“Oh, is the little deathworlder getting the _hint_?” Remus asked. “What tipped you off? The drugging of all your friends or when I told you to eject yourself from the ship?” 

“What…” Virgil shivered with his whole body. “Why…?”

“Don’t chicken out now, Virgie,” The alien said. “I’d simply hate to have to go through the trouble of stabbing out each of Patton’s hearts because you got cracked bone plates.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, a fake expression that made Virgil’s stomach twist in on itself. “Or maybe I’ll just start with Janus, and see how much pain a human can actually take.”

“ _Don’t_ ,” Virgil’s voice came out as its own growl, sounding damn near inhuman. 

Virgil didn’t think about the Pol’turs, didn’t think about Janus on that table knowing that no one is coming for him, didn’t think about the scars on the side of his face that Janus pretended didn’t bother him, but Virgil had caught him pointedly not looking in the mirror so many times-- He didn’t think about it, but his brain screamed at him anyway.

“I don’t know what I did to you,” Virgil said. “But leave him out of this. All of them. Roman included. Look I… I’m sorr--”

The Erefren’s tail struck through the air and before Virgil knew what he was doing he slammed the button on the door lock and forced them shut. He stumbled deeper into the pod, nearly falling to the ground as the sound of Remus’s barbed tail spikes carved into the thick heavy metal separating them. The ship was so cold that Virgil could see his breath in the air, but all he felt was a feverish as he stared through the foggy window at where Remus was standing with an expression that was possibly more murderous than anything Virgil had ever seen before. 

Janus’s mother had been vile and sadistic when she thought that Virgil had killed her perfect son, the police had been cold and merciless when they called him a suspect, the people Virgil hadn’t even known had become ruthless and brutal when they glared at him doing anything out in public. His own parents had looked at him with hatred when they realized that the rest of the world would shun them just because Virgil was their son, but even that had been nothing compared to the look in Remus’s dark eyes. 

It was _bloodlust._ And it was directed at Virgil with no regard for anything else.

Remus sneered, almost loud enough for Virgil to hear through both the sets of doors and the static screaming in his ears. His mouth tasted like Dust, his skin prickled with a heat that wasn’t real, his fingers dripped with blood and ached in all the ways that his hands always did after he killed someone with them. He felt like if he took a single step he’d float right off into Space with or without the walls around him

Remus’s mouth moved, words or curses or whatever, but Virgil couldn’t hear them and cared even less. 

“I don’t know what I did to you,” Virgil said with his hands shaking over the square red eject button. Last words for only him to know and no one else to ever find out. He thought of Janus asleep in his bed, safe and sound and not knowing anything that was going on. He thought of the feel of Janus’s lips on his, the featherlight touch and sweet honey-eyed look he reserved just for Virgil. He thought of those words he last said to him, _“Later Loser, Sleep well”_ and thought it was ever so poetic that they mirrored those last things that Janus had said to him before he disappeared off the Earth three years ago.

Virgil hoped that Janus wouldn’t take them to heart too much-- not like Virgil had when he agonized over them and wouldn’t believe that Janus had run away without telling him and the rumors had first started their rounds. He hoped that Janus would forgive him for being stupid in the middle of the night. He hoped that Janus would wait for him to find a way back to them.

Out in Space, he wasn’t certain of much, but he was certain that he meant it when he gritted his teeth together, and said, “Remus, I hope you rot in Hell.”

Virgil slammed his bleeding fingers down on the eject button, and at the same moment blinding white light filled the Transport Room from the hall. 

He got just enough time to recognize Roman’s unmistakable form stumbling into the room behind Remus, and then the entire pod lurched backwards.


End file.
